Earl is blowing away our vacation / The Quest for Culinary Inspiration.

This is where we are/ were planning to visit this weekend.
 (Cape Hatteras)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/us/02hurricane.html?src=me

 at least it won't be crowded if we do go!
Perhaps the mountains are calling us this weekend, although it would be a shame to miss the beach all together, having been so close to it the entire summer. I guess that's what happens when you don't have any real income until July and then you fly too and fro across the country with what little income you have, and then once you're back on your feet you buy a car. ...Yep... The new car, however, means that we are able to go somewhere this weekend with pretty high assurance that we will get home again, us and our car. We love the Camry, but she's quite a gamble these days.

I've decided to be more adventurous with the dinners I make. I feel like i'm not living up to my potential in my home kitchen. Its not that i don't make good food, but that the good food that I make is familiar and predictable, and I paid $40,000 (I say "I" here but what I really mean is my wonderful Father, whom I am currently attempting to pay back on a regular basis)  to overcome the familiar and predictable. I didn't just pay the money to get a degree either, I loved what i was learning and I was good at it, I am good at it. SO how come my friends who got their degrees in Accounting and Public Relations have better meals than I do?  I have tried 4 new meals in the past week 1/2. The Sweet Curry-tuna Salad was good, but so much more work than a tuna melt, which is one of our standards. The Thai Spicy Asian Noodles that I made yesterday were good, but I made the soba noodles by hand and cut them too thick, so it was more like eating Asian chicken and dumplings than pasta. I ended up throwing away a good hours work worth of noodles and boiling regular spaghetti to go with the leftovers. (Bummer) The Orange Ginger Chicken Slaw needed to be either orangy or soy saucy, and not both. And lastly (well these are not in any kind of order anyway) I made a killer omelet, which I am very proud of, but the thing is that the recipe was supposed to be a breakfast burrito, and even if i had wrapped 1 or 2 tortillas around the gigantic thing, it was still ordinary.

I'd like to think that if I could afford all the ingredients that I want to work with, that  we would have exciting meals at least 3 times a week. ... its nice to have dreams.
what are we having tonight? Probably tacos or maybe we'll use those McDonald's coups. we have lying around...